Twitter, one of the most popular social media platforms today, has been considering raising the 140 character limit to 10,000 characters.

Although the company has not officially decided to implement this change, it is meant to benefit both the company and users of the program. Recently, instead of typing tweets, users have begun typing up statuses in their notes app, screenshotting their writings, and posting them as photos to Twitter. This tactic has been helpful to the users who wish to express a larger amount of words.

Corbin Adams, delivery driver for PT’s Coffee on College Hill, said that he “checks Twitter at every free moment.”

“I imagine that [the Twitter change] has to do with keeping up with social media,” Adams said. “Limiting characters kind of feels dated. I could see it serving a purpose to people like political activists, but for the average Twitter user, [this change] shouldn’t help.”

Twitter, however, is not just implementing this possible change in order to keep up with other social media giants. Advertisers on Twitter are unable to tailor their advertisements to specific customers because their algorithms depend upon actual typed text to search for keywords, meaning that they cannot read the screenshotted photo statuses. Increasing the character limit would be a way of getting users to actually type things instead of screenshot text.

Joshua Wright, freshman exercise physiology major, is also an avid Twitter user.

“[Twitter is changing] probably because people feel the need to express their opinion, and they don’t feel like they have enough space to do that in such a way that [Twitter] feels is necessary,” Wright said.

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, recently posted a screenshot of some of his thoughts on the possible change.

“As long as it’s consistent with what people want to do, we’re going to explore it,” Dorsey said in his own screenshot.

Despite the hype on this topic, there has not been an official announcement from Twitter about implementing this change.

Web Link:

https://www.washburnreview.org/news/twitter-plans-to-increase-character-limit/article_cfed13ec-bd7f-11e5-85ad-632bc0700f4d.html